Major cloud providers have recently been building cloud markets, which serve as a hosting platform for virtual machines (VMs) pre-installed with a variety of software stacks. Customers of cloud computing providers leverage such markets by downloading and instantiating the VMs that best suit their computing needs, thereby saving the effort needed to configure and build VMs from scratch.
Customers' ability to link VMs to interact, such as by adding security tool VMs or other utilities to a work VM, is disallowed. Instead, each virtualized platform has one privileged VM (also called the management VM), controlled by the cloud provider, that supervises the execution of customer VMs. The management VM oversees all I/O from customer VMs, and completely isolates VMs from each other. While such isolation is desirable across VMs of different customers, it also prevents VMs belonging to the same customer from interacting in useful ways.